Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
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Stories
Most of what happens to me in the classroom isn't enough to merit its own extended blog post. But as the Vietnamese school year comes to a close, I want to share a collection of stories from my classes. This is the first of 2 installments of the teaching 'story basket'. So without further adieu, here are 4 little windows into what class with Peter is like.
With the 40-year anniversary of the end of the war between Vietnam and America in a few days, the timing of this was fortuitous. Our story begins with a dinner, as many of my stories do. One of my former students, Linh (pronounced “ling’), had invited me to have dinner with her and her family. Soon they would be leaving for Newfoundland, Canada. They would be living in a small college town on the Eastern coast while her husband, Dzung (pronounced “zoong”), earned his Ph.D. At the end of this dinner they invited us to come to Bac Ninh Province (just North of Hanoi) to have a large dinner with their extended family.
It was good to get back home so that I could start making money instead of spending it. Spring has come to Hanoi. With summer just around the corner the streets are now littered with the flip-flops of small children and we are receiving more rain than I thought possible. One rainy Tuesday morning around 6am I woke up to my phone ringing.
I was disappointed when the original plan for the trip (which was motorbike island hopping from Bali to Flores and back) fell through, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still get some riding in while I was still on Bali. I had been told that I needed to check out a little town called Lovina in the North of Bali. Standing between us and Lovina were some pretty formidable mountains that surrounded Bali’s volcanoes, so it was going to be a fun trip.
Labuan Bajo is a city that I had looked at least 100 times on the map. I don’t know what I expected it to look like but it was looking pretty amazing from the deck of the boat as we blew closer to the harbor. It was looking amazing simply because it was land. If you’ve read my past few posts you know that this had been a pretty traumatizing voyage. It was high seas that day as we approached the end of our trip but I stood out on the open deck counting this minutes down until we got to the harbor and I could live the rest of my life on dry land.
Komodo National Park opened at 7:30am and the dragons were said to be most active during the early morning. We were told to be up by 7am in order to have breakfast and get ready to venture into the park, so naturally everybody woke up at 5:45am. On our agenda that day were Komodo Island and Rinca Island. Those are 2 of the 4 main islands that compose Komodo National Park and they are the only 2 islands that are open to the public.
We sailed further into the islands to a place called ‘Manta Point.’ This place was famous amongst divers for, you guessed it, manta rays. As far as I could tell, Manta Point wasn’t really an actual ‘point’, rather just a large area of water in the middle of the Komodo Islands. Our boat slowed down as we approached Manta ‘area.’ The crew leaned off the deck, scouring the clear, blue water. Then there was a shout. Off in the distance what looked like a large fin broke the surface. As we continued I could see big dark patches moving around beneath the boat and obstructing the purity of the water's light blue coloring. These were manta rays. I was so jazzed that I jumped in with no sunscreen, which was a terrible decision, but I was busy swimming through this...
We sat on the deck of the boat eating our dinner together. Nobody was speaking. We were not in good spirits. Lightning flashed silently off in the distance in all directions with increasing frequency. The coast of Sumbawa sat calmly a few hundred meters away. I watched the lights twinkle from shore, wishing I was there instead of on this boat. With the wind picking up, we could all feel the storm coming.
The rest of us, strangers to one another at this point, looked at each other, and then with an uneasy shrug climbed down onto the deck of this tiny boat. It bobbled precariously with every passing wave. One thing was certain: this was going to be interesting. So let’s fast-forward a little bit, shall we?
Although Mount Batur has been active as recently as the year 2000, its last major eruption was in 1968. In the 47 years since, Mount Batur has been (mostly) dormant. What does that mean for us? It seems to be the general consensus on Bali that this means it is about due for another eruption. So naturally, we decided to climb it.
